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Pearson Digital Learning in the News
 SuccessMaker Project Lives Up to Name The
Gazette (Cedar Rapids, Iowa) CEDAR RAPIDS - School officials at Roosevelt Middle School believe a pilot program is helping them close the achievement gap in reading. "We think we have pretty spectacular results," said Katie Hinds, teacher in the school's Reading Center, which helps struggling students. "It has a lot of potential for the district." Hinds and other teachers presented the results of their pilot project to the Cedar Rapids school board last week. The results show that students who spent at least 12 hours, in 15- to 20-minute sessions, using the computer software supplemental guided reading program SuccessMaker, averaged one year and one month of progress in six months. In a nine-month school year, teachers aim for at least one year's worth of growth. But Carolyn Cleveland, principal at Roosevelt, noted that students who are behind have to make up more than that to close the achievement gap. "It's very, very hard to succeed in a classroom when you're reading at a second- or third-grade level," she said. Students who were struggling the most—often reading at a second- or third-grade level in middle school—got the most out of the program, said Kandy Bekeris, paraprofessional at Roosevelt. Most of these students made two-and-a-half to three years' worth of growth in six months, she said. The program was aimed at students who were behind grade level expectation and who scored at less than the 40th percentile on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills. Some were in special education, although many were not, Cleveland said. "Our effort is aimed at trying to prevent students from falling into special education," she said. This school year, 44 percent of Roosevelt's students were not proficient in reading, scoring lower than the 40th percentile on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills taken in the fall. Fifty percent of the school's sixth graders, 42 percent of seventh graders and 38.5 percent of its eighth graders are considered not proficient in reading. SuccessMaker is published by NCS Pearson, which has offices in Cedar Rapids and Iowa City, but Cleveland noted there were similar programs on the market that the school looked at before selecting this one. The growth results are based on SuccessMaker's pre- and post-tests, but are backed by results of the Stanford Reading Diagnostic Test given to students in the fall and spring. The school will also compare how these students do on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills in the fall. Cleveland cautioned that SuccessMaker is only one of several programs Roosevelt has used in the last couple of years aimed at improving student reading abilities, so it is somewhat difficult to determine if that alone is the reason for the improvement. The downside of the program is its cost, Cleveland said. It cost about $14,000 to buy the program and 10 software licenses, which can handle about 150 students a day. The money came from the district's Drop-out Prevention and Individuals With Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) funds, some of which Cedar Rapids is using to help prevent students from going into special education in the first place. Cleveland said the school would never have been able to afford the program on its own. Roosevelt was chosen for the pilot project because, Cleveland acknowledged, "We've been begging." The school hasn't had a remedial reading drill program for three or four years, she said. Roosevelt no longer has Macintosh computers to run an older reading software program still used in some middle schools. It also needed a program that was geared to students who were at an elementary grade level reading ability and the other program was at too high a level for many students, Cleveland said. Other schools, however, can benefit from Roosevelt's research,
she said. Copyright 2003 Gazette Communications. Republished with the permission of the Gazette Communications. No further republication or redistribution is permitted without the express approval of the Gazette Communications |
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